Terence Powderly and the Mayor Who Built a Labor Movement

In eighteen seventy-eight, one year after the bloodshed of the Great Railroad Strike, the workers of Scranton did something remarkable. They organized a political movement, ran their own candidate for mayor, and won. The man they elected was Terence Vincent Powderly, the son of an Irish immigrant, a railroad machinist by trade, and a man who was about to become one of the most powerful labor leaders in American history.

Powderly served three two-year terms as mayor of Scranton from eighteen seventy-eight to eighteen eighty-four, running under the banner of the Greenback-Labor Party. In office, he pushed for practical reforms: a board of health, an end to municipal corruption, paved roads, and a modern sewage system. He brought the mentality of a craftsman to city government, asking what was broken and fixing it.

At the same time, Powderly was rising through the ranks of a secret labor organization called the Knights of Labor. He joined in eighteen seventy-four, became a district secretary in eighteen seventy-seven, and by eighteen seventy-nine had been elected Grand Master Workman, the organization's national leader. He ran the Knights for fourteen years.

The Knights of Labor believed that all workers, regardless of craft, race, or gender, could and should belong to one organization. That was a radical idea in an era when most unions organized only around specific trades. At the Knights' peak in eighteen eighty-six, the organization claimed a membership of seven hundred thousand across the country.

Powderly eventually lost control of the Knights to internal divisions and the aftermath of the Haymarket violence of eighteen eighty-six, which his opponents used to tar the entire labor movement. But his legacy in Scranton is permanent. He proved that workers in an industrial city could govern themselves, and he helped establish the idea that labor organizing was a legitimate form of American civic life.